User blog:RRabbit42/Extra, Extra! Bunny seeks to adopt wiki!
Once again, I find myself in a familiar position, and yet, this time it's unique. Most of the wikis I have adopted over the past two years have out of necessity. I would put a lot of effort into cleaning up vandalism and then needed to adopt the wiki to keep it from coming back. In other cases, I was promoted to admin and sometimes also a bureaucrat as thanks for that cleanup. For a few of both cases, I wound up being an admin of a wiki that I have very little in common with. I keep watch over those wikis to ensure that if there is any vandalism, it's dealt with, but I just don't have the ability to make them flourish because they are so far away from my interests. It's been a very long time since I adopted a wiki because I was genuinely interested in the subject and not because I had to. The last ones I can remember are Kim Possible and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. Broodhollow is a webcomic that I have become especially interested in, but it's not because of its supernatural and horror aspects. It's because of the detail that's going into the artwork and the background materials. It's because I can see that Kris Straub is rewarding people for paying attention. It's because I can watch a story evolve and grow over time, and see how different it becomes from the original short stories that inspired it. And it's because this wiki is a blank slate. Imagine you've read a few Harry Potter books or watched a couple of Doctor Who episodes and you find you've got this whole world to explore. You then want to learn more about it so you go searching for a wiki on them. Can you imagine what it would be like to find that no one had created a wiki about them? That's almost what happened here. Three months ago, Kris had to shut down his own Broodhollow Wiki because it got overrun by spambots. I found this wiki a few days later, back when there were only four pages. All four had been created on the same day by the person who founded the wiki and he left that same day. I made a couple of edits, but didn't do much. It wasn't until Lianakerr started adding the descriptions of each comic page that I first became interested in what this wiki could become. She wrote them so that one of her friends who is blind could also enjoy the story, and those descriptions had been a casualty of the spambot attack on the original wiki. They're back now, and cover the first two books. We're just a few weeks away from when Book 3 will start and a Kickstarter project will begin to have Book 2 published as a physical book. This gives us time to start filling in our own background materials, with pages for the characters, locations and everything else related to Broodhollow. Even after adding over 250 new pages, this wiki is still essentially a blank slate. By that, I mean we're free to try out new ideas without fear that activating a feature will break or completely alter how the articles will look. That's a very real concern for established wikis, and even if there might be significant improvements with the new features, the thought of having to update hundreds or thousands of pages can be overwhelming. The majority of the pages here right now are deliberately minimal in design because of their primary readers (people who are blind or have low vision and are using programs to help them read web pages). I'm an admin on two wikis that held off from using the new features due to the weight of what would have to be updated. I want to use this wiki to explore what can be done, to see how those features work and figure out if they can be used on the other wikis. In order to do this, I will need to (and will be glad to) adopt this wiki. Comments about this adoption can be left until Friday, December 26. As long as there aren't any major issues I need to resolve before then, I will turn in the adoption request that night or during the weekend. Category:Community News Category:Inactive blogs